Re: Share with the community your gutsy install/upgrade experience

I just did an upgrade from 7.04 Feisty to 7.10 Gutsy (32-bit) on an older PC without a hitch (was running Fedora Core 5, then Feisty, now Gutsy). I did run into the refresh rates reportedly incorrectly by NVIDIA's restricted drivers, but disabling it in my xorg.conf (added line: Option "DynamicTwinView" "false") worked fine. Specs of the PC that worked great with the upgrade:

Re: Share with the community your gutsy install/upgrade experience

Well here's my experience, I had a few major issues that have nothing to do with the distro really, but none the less this is what I experienced after I attempted to upgrade. I ended up just installing Kubuntu from scratch so it's a bit of Ubuntu Fiesty vs. Kubuntu Gutsy comparison towards the end. I should also point out that poll is flawed, since you can only vote for either install or upgrade. I'd like to vote on both.

Updates really annoy me in general, every time I start up a computer or a piece of software, when all I want to do is get some work done, the first thing it does is pester me to update something or other. The consequences of not keeping up-to-date are scary enough for me not to firewall or delete all the various update checkers. I know from previous experience not to let a linux distro get too far behind or you'll never be able to figure out how to update it.

Anyway, I had a perfectly working Feisty Ubuntu laptop with beryl and wine all meticulously configured to enable me to brag to all the pussies who got scammed by Vista (Vista was the single biggest reason I decided to finally make the switch to Linux for my desktop computing). Months of happiness ensued. Recently, after a couple of weeks of avoiding updates I finally decided to let it do it's thing. It said something about a major version upgrade... whatever! I just blindly clicked ok on stuff and let it go, well I didn't realise it was going to take so long and so the battery died half way thorough. DOH!

I restarted it and realised what had happened and started to worry that it might be a bit serious. It started back up again alright and aside from a warning about the upgrade process being interupted, it started upgrading from scratch again no worries. This time I made sure to plug it in at the wall and went off to work. When I got back home it had died a second time because I had neglected to actually switch on the switch (or some hippy had decided to switch it off, I'm still not sure what happened there but the point is it happened again somehow). So once again I begin the upgrade, it seems to recover alright. By this point I'm thinking "Wow, this upgrade process is damn robust if it can take a hammering like this. What a tribute to Champions of open source!". It appeared to run fine, I let it run overnight and the next morning it was stuck somewhere. I rebooted and got a bunch of xorg.conf errors and no GUI. So I made yet another mistake, I paniced and assumed it was all stuffed.

The next day I downloaded Kubuntu and just installed that over the top of that partition. I must say KDE is much nicer than Gnome. The first install didn't go so well because for some reason Adept reported a major version upgrade straight away and tried to upgrade Gutsy to Gutsy and then failed to reboot. The second installation attempt went smoothly when I avoided clicking the major version upgrade button. The first thing I noticed was the "Add/Remove Programs" option. The available packages were great, much easier to install use than the Gnome equivalents. Using Adept, I was able to setup a CISCO compatible VPN client to connect to work in about 15 minutes using only GUI's and importing my Windows client configuration file, I was impressed since this was something which had always eluded me in Gnome. I'm not prepared to spend days pouring over semi-obsolete documentation and hacking weird config files just to get something working. Well maybe I'll do that to get quality audio-visual performance, but that's a different story.

Downsides were the nvidia drivers were much easier to setup properly in Gnome (if I remember I just went into Synaptic and selected the "new" nvidia drivers), The nvidia settings applet which I used to easily configure dual-head was just missing. The sound is crackly in games at the moment and I still haven't solved that but when I first installed Ubuntu I had no sound at all, so to be fair this is an improvement. I still haven't figured out how to install CompizFusion on there. Adept has some issues, like failing to warn you about dependant packages and having no history or even logs to tell you what you've just nuked. I prefer Synaptic on that front. Also, Strigi is a piece of crap you don't need. But that's just a personal preference. I know these desktop index tools are all the rage these days on all the new operating systems, but what ever happened to just knowing where you files are because you have a structured file system? It was very easy to uninstall, and as soon as I figured out what it was that was exactly what I did with it. Konqueror also is a piece of crap browser, but the add remove programs thing was very easy to find and very user friendly. Lots of good packages in there.

Overall and despite the negatives I still think this is the best OS I've ever used. I'm never going back to Gnome, KDE craps all over it for desktop computing. I'd have to recommend Canonical focus on marketing Kubuntu over Ubuntu for end users.

Re: Share with the community your gutsy install/upgrade experience

I decided to put Ubuntu on two older machines rather than fighting Fedora upgrades again. Well, the less older machine wasn't difficult; I still have some more customization to do. The 180 MHz Gateway is a big problem!! It seems that the best resolution I can get is 800x600. With that the"Install" window does not fit on the screen, and there are no scroll bars on it. So I can't see the "back", "next", and what ever other buttons are there. Well then, quess, hitting Tab and Enter a number of times until it appears that forward progress is being made.

Re: Share with the community your gutsy install/upgrade experience

1. Did it worked flawlessly ?
2. Did you got problems ?
3. Did you manage to solve them ?
if yes how ?

1. No. It didn't worked flawlessly....
I've done an upgrade vie I-net and it seemed to work untill the point after downloading the files, installing and configuring them.

2. Yes I did had some problems:[/B][/B]
Somewhere between installing and configuring the components, it hung up and nothing seemed to work. No response on my screen. No response by killing X. No response on anything I did.
And I waited allllllooonnng time before I decided to shutdown the machine the hard way.
After rebooting - same ****.

3. Yes, I found an other way to manage the problem.
After backing up my shi*- by the way, 8 hours later - I installed "gutsy" from the live disk, had done an upgrade, installed my stuff and back again... finaly

Managing the upgrade from DapperDra** to FaistyFawn was much easier....

Re: Share with the community your gutsy install/upgrade experience

Saw Manning had a book on Ubuntu Server. Got that in an effort to try to learn more. Downloaded 7.10 Server, Desktop and Jeos to try them in latest 6.0.2 VMWare Workstation.

Did it worked flawlessly ? - NO
Server installed OK. Reboot results in a 'PANIC CPU too old'. Seems my laptop CPU does not have PAE. A thing with certain Pentium M. hmmm...why no test for this before starting install and maybe then fall back on generic kernel? In any case I'd rather be told my version of CPU does not support PAE and to run I need a generic kernel rather than 'CPU too old'. Saves alot of googling. The workaround is to start doing a recover system installing generic kernel. Fine - but not for beginners. I left it at that.

So went on to Jeos since I wanted to run my Ubuntu in a VMWare machine. Installs flawless like Server but on Reboot hangs dead at first screen and thats it with Jeos. Left it at that. Maybe I misunderstood the use of Jeos.

Desktop install work just as fine as the other.Some graphical problems (wrong screen resolution) and VMWare Tools not installing OK but system runs atleast.

Did you got problems ? - YES
Did you manage to solve them ? - NOT entirely. Left Server install and Jeos install and had to use Desktop which was not what I needed.

Re: Share with the community your gutsy install/upgrade experience

1) Installer booted up and the GUI was very very very slow. Took 20 minutes of just sitting there to render the first screen. Buttons weren't completely rendered, and by mouse overing I found it to resemble a familiar desktop. I was able to find Aternate graphics mode or some such. After selecting that, the install went by without a hitch.

2) After my machine was installed, I needed to switch to static IP from DHCP. Upon clicking the handy little gui deal in the top right and clicking "Manual configuration" and filling out the required info my net died. Simply swapping it back to Roaming (or whatever it said) did not solve the problem. I got down and dirty in the /etc/ folder to solve this (thank goodness I have linux experience). Wont go into these details as they are documented in the forums.

Other than that nothing really went wrong. There was some quirkyness setting up the nVidia drivers, but I just poked around in the gksudo nvidia-config and rebooted and it all worked. Never did get Postfix to do what I wanted, but that's not Ubuntu's fault.

Re: Share with the community your gutsy install/upgrade experience

I've got one system that just will not allow me to install Ubuntu on it. It's a Dell Inspiron 5100 laptop, so I couldn't get the Live CD to work to install from it (black screen instead of the desktop and no boot flags would fix it). So I figured no biggie I like the Alternate CD better anyway because it's faster. However that failed trying to resize the existing Windows partition and left me with an UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME blue screen on booting XP. So I booted from the XP install CD, entered recovery mode, ran chkdsk /r and then fixboot and that got me back into Windows. But now nothing can resize this partition. I've tried the Alternate CD installer, GParted, and Partition Magic, and they all fail. I get the infamous error 1529, which is in numerous unsolved forums threads all over the internet. I've defragged and chkdsked and deleted the Windows swap file and yadda yadda but nothing gets me any further. So unless I want to reformat over my partner's XP partition (and she has pretty emphatically said no to that idea), I'm stopped in my tracks. Although this doesn't seem to be an Ubuntu problem in particular, it's keeping Ubuntu off of one laptop for the time being.

Re: Share with the community your gutsy install/upgrade experience

Hi. My fresh install of Ubuntu 7.10 was ok. It made a partition, installed grub, etc.

BUT:
For some good reason I tried to re-install it again from the live cd, in the same partition (the one created in the first install). Well... perhaps I didn't find my way around, but the installer insisted in making a new partition instead of using the existing one. I ended with a messed-up grub, and I was unable to start linux nor windows. I ended reinstalling everything from scratch !!! Not nice...

Re: Share with the community your gutsy install/upgrade experience

michaelzap, if GParted and Partition Magic can't resize the volume, chances are there is something wrong with the partition, or the proprietary partition that Dell puts on its laptops for its recovery tools (not the XP partition) is hosing and/or confusing things.

If you want both XP and Ubuntu on there, I'd recommend wiping all partitions (after copying over existing data of course), and starting fresh from a clean XP install on its own partition, then an Ubuntu install after, in another partition.

I assume you were trying to resize an NTFS partition? With FAT32 or ext2/3 this would have been much easier.